How Fincon and Financial Mentor Helped Change My Direction

For those of you who haven’t been, Fincon is a conference that sparks ideas. Steve Chou gave a presentation about how his auto-responder made him $300,000 (no, Steve, you did that, the tool didn’t!). You get to hang out with all kinds of people who have “made it” online. You have a great time, and then you go home. With ideas and schemes.

Write an ebook!

Create an online course!

Get an auto responder that will make you $300,000!

Start a mastermind group!

Learn more than you expect at Fincon.

One of the best talks I went to was done by Todd Tresidder, of Financial Mentor. He’s not someone I know online, but in person, he is approachable and friendly. He wrote a book, which is impressive. His talk was inspiring because he made it clear he had a system.

His book, which I’ll review in November, is called “How Much Money Do I Need to Retire?” and he mentioned two things that left my brain engaged.

One is the rule of 300. I’d never heard of this before, but if you want to evaluate the long-term value of a product, you multiply your average monthly income from that product by 300.

The other thing he said was that this book was the first of 12 he was writing. He already had 12 books planned when he wrote the first one. That’s extraordinary.

I want to write a book! I thought. Maybe I’ll email Todd to see if I can pick his brain.

Hi Todd! How did you know how many books you were going to write? How did you decide to self-publish? How did you pick your topics? Why did you print some in hard copies? I could go in a few different directions with my book, should I pick the one that gets the most search traffic?

I think there were a lot of question marks in my email, because he immediately responded and said, “Sounds like a phone call. How’s tomorrow morning?”

So we talked for nearly 45 minutes about his process, about his clients, about his successes. And of course I asked my questions. Every last one of them. I told him that my posts about online dating got more traffic than most of the rest of my site. Should I write about those instead?

“Wait a second. What are online dating posts doing on Frugal Portland?” he asked.

Oh, I don’t know. I write about whatever I want. Then see what sticks.

“What’s your long-term goal with Frugal Portland?” No idea.

“Could you talk more about online dating?” Yes indeed I could!

“You need to find your focus before you think about writing a book. Once you’ve found your focus, you’ll see the questions people are asking, you’ll see how you can help them the most.”

We talked about mailing lists and asking our readers what they wanted to see.

The next day, I bought a new domain (already ranked PR4! Let’s see if that turns out to be a good investment) and redirected all my dating/relationship posts to it.

The new site is called Ignite Fire, and it’s a collaborative effort. Life, love, dating, relationships, online dating, where to meet people, and, most entertainingly, the bad dates.

Another thing I learned from Fincon was to create more content of value. And that means not posting all the time. Create less, promote more. Derek Halpern said it was the 80/20 rule in action. Spend 80% of your time promoting content.

That means creating content that can be promoted.

I moved those posts a week ago, and already the search engine traffic here makes more sense. People land here searching for “how to save 50% of income” now instead of “how to meet men not online” – that makes so much more sense.

I think finding a focus is tricky when it comes to frugal living because frugality affects ALL aspects of lifestyle. I'm trying to figure out my brand too- I have so much to write about running and weddings, both of which are somewhat tangential from my topic. I just don't know that I can maintain that many separate blogs.

I think with a URL like yours you can easily incorporate both running and weddings. Running is the cheapest exercise (as long as you don't do too many races!) and the wedding angle can be interesting from the "broke and beautiful" angle.

Thanks for the acknowledgement, Kathleen. This is great news for your business. I talk with a lot of people but not everyone takes action. You are an action taker. I can't wait to see where you go with these brands.

I'm kind of in a similar boat. I don't know the true direction my blog will wind up taking. I'll probably wind up waiting a while longer to see what posts wind up garnering the most attention. If it winds up being something non-finance related, I'm not really sure what I would do. I don't picture myself having the energy to maintain multiple sites at the moment. Maybe once I'm done with school, that will change.

Yay, I've been waiting for this post! Todd is awesome, I really enjoyed meeting him last year, and his books have made me much more serious about investing and saving. I will be a regular over there at Ignite Fire!